FOR THE LOVE OF FOOD: Canada’s new food guide shuns industry, sunscreen is the new margarine, and exercise “snacks” improve fitness
by Darya Rose | Jan 25, 2019
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
This week Canada’s new food guide shuns industry, sunscreen is the new margarine, and exercise “snacks” improve fitness.
Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!
Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!
I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.
Links of the week
- Canada’s new food guide is loyal to science, not the food industry – Hey guess what?? The new Canadian food guide that’s receiving tons of praise is pretty much a clone of the Foodist Plate. Amazing what happens when you take industry influence out of dietary guidelines and base it on science. (Treehugger)
- Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? – A lot of this is dead on. I don’t like that he ignores that UV exposure definitely contributes to skin aging, but the relationship between sunscreen and melanoma isn’t as straightforward as you’d think. (Outdoor Online)
- How Exercise May Help Keep Our Memory Sharp – So interesting. I’m excited to see where research on irisin leads. (NY Times)
- Even a 20-Second Exercise ‘Snack’ Can Improve Fitness – Exercise snacks! I’m actually really impressed at the degree of improvement in aerobic fitness from such a brief intervention (5 percent). Remember that there isn’t an amount of exercise that’s so small it’s “not worth it.” Do what you can and build from there. (NY Times)
- Diet and food production must radically change to save planet – Wow. I hope governments around the world (especially the US) start to acknowledge and implement policies to address this reality soon. (ScienceDaily)
- A Simple Brown Rice Sushi Bowl – This vegetarian “sushi” bowl is a beautiful, simple and elegant meal or substantial snack. Love these flavors. (101 Cookbooks)
- Teri’s Sliced Orange Salad with Arugula, Fennel & Shaved Parmesan – I’m a big fan of winter salads. Not usually as the main course, but as a starter. Personally I’d use the wonderfully bitter chicories that are easy to find this time of year rather than arugula, but both are delicious. (Alexandra’s Kitchen)
What inspired you this week?
Once again… the science is firmly behind using sunscreen. See Dr Dray on YouTube for references that refute these claims… just plain silly
Thanks for the interesting links! Regarding the sunscreen article,at first I felt that it focused only on mortality while ignoring the other impacts non-melanoma skin cancers can cause. Those skin cancers can be physically disfiguring, painful, and take significant money and time to treat. My 90+ year old grandmother tried months of radiation and surgery for squamous-cell carcinoma of her nose, but it came back more aggressive. They had to remove her nose to stop the cancer from spreading and damaging more critical structures (she has a prosthetic nose now and is doing fine). However, after I read the article all the way through, I recognized that the recommendations from other countries are to have daily sun exposure without burning. That doesn’t seem unreasonable, and that same grandmother that has struggled with skin cancer is the longest living and has the best overall health of my relatives in her generation. I have no way of knowing if her incidences of skin cancer we’re from periodic sunburns or daily non-burning exposure, so it’s still unclear what I’m really risking with daily exposure. Anyway, it’s nice to see researchers working to understand the human body as a whole, interrelated system.
For the sunscreen article, it is “Outside Online”, not “outdoor online” (as you mentioned in the end).
As far as my limited scientific knowledge regarding the biological set up and needs of human body is concerned, nothing is black and white. You need sun as well as you need sunscreen. Maintain balance and you can lead a healthy life. I don’t understand the logic of few people who try to gatekeep the usage of sunscreen.